


Fix Up

by Gammarad



Category: Original Work
Genre: Androids, F/F, Robots kink on repair and being repaired, Technobabble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-09
Updated: 2020-09-09
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:01:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26369131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gammarad/pseuds/Gammarad
Summary: AIs can buy themselves bodies in physical reality and inhabit them, if they're willing to work to make the money to pay for them. A lot of them do physically challenging work and get damaged. Bron repairs them. She loves her work. Most repair techs are human, but Bron's an AI.
Relationships: Bot in Need of Repair / Repair Tech Bot
Comments: 4
Kudos: 10
Collections: We Die Like Fen 4: We Lived to Die Afen





	Fix Up

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Masu_Trout](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Masu_Trout/gifts).



Bron scanned the output. Illegal mods. Several broken servos, disconnected cabling, what might be a coolant leak near the core or might be a sensor malfunction on the coolant level. The alarm blinked at the back of her attention over the illegal mods, red-green-red, red-yellow-red, red-blue-red, red-white-red, red-green-red. She shut it off impatiently.

Diagnostics of her own body's equally illegal mods were giving perfectly legal readouts. They also were in excellent working condition, multiple months until service would be needed, according to those same readouts. Bron did self-maintenance. She didn't need to be notified of when her own body needed service by diagnostics, she sensed it directly.

There were parts she'd never seen before in the Slow. She'd seen everything in Virtual, of course, she knew what it all was. She kept up-to-date compulsively. There were custom parts here that she'd wondered why anyone would want to mock up, much less go to the expense of building for Real.

A V-chat message request from her job popped up. She put it on hold while she finished the estimate, sent that in reply without even reading the message.

Another notify. Bron read this one. "Why would anyone go Real just to be a repair tech?"

"Why would anyone build a sensory-stim-adjuster that takes arbitrary input?" Bron sent back.

"It's for my specialty," the job answered. Bron checked the identity info. Cimi, semi-serious backronym Corporeal Interactive Mechanical Intelligence, oh, she was one of _those_. Bron had known a few, though she didn't keep in touch. 

Good thing she didn't need to understand Cimi to fix her body. 

Bron got started on the task in front of her. She carefully began to disassemble Cimi's core, to get at the place where there was either a leak or a bad sensor, because if it was a leak it'd need stopped immediately and cleaned up before the rest of the fixes, and if it was a bad sensor something else might have gone wrong that wasn't on the readouts. 

Diagnostics began showing her some unexpected shifts. Sensors were going off that shouldn't be. There were reasons some of those mods were illegal. She went slower, pinged the V-chat with an estimate she'd revised upward.

"No need to slow down so much," Cimi replied in the V-chat.

"Your sensors are going to malfunction even worse if I don't."

"They aren't malfunctioning at all. In fact, it feels good. I like how you're touching me. You're careful. Delicate."

Bron's internal sensors might be miscalibrated. V-chat shouldn't cause that sort of reaction. She continued the disassembly. Gradually she went back to a more typical rate of work. There was a whole subprocess spinning off in her mind and she let it run. She didn't want to look at its output. Too distracting. She was working.

The job -- she somehow couldn't keep thinking of Cimi that way, not like she always had before -- kept reacting to everything Bron did. Reacting postively, like she was enjoying it. Like it gave her this constantly surprising pleasure to be taken apart and have her parts realigned, reattached, diagnosed and put back in order. Bron fed all that data directly into the subprocess that was using quite a bit of chip time. If it was going to use clock cycles it might as well be useful and handle the incoming data not related to the work.

In her main process, the one that was actually doing the repair, Bron found the problem. Not a malfunctioning sensor, not a leak, there was a blockage in the coolant flow and an overheating valve and the subprocess she'd left running was pulling more and more resources and it was so difficult to get enough units allocated to the actual repairs she was supposed to be doing, where was that process going, anyway? There, the blockage was out, carefully, pings in the V-chat "oh that feels so good what did you do" and Bron couldn't even spare a cycle to reply. She carefully partitioned the runaway process into a sandbox vm and began the reassembly process with renewed care.

"Before I finish reassembling," Bron said in V-chat, pushing past her very reasonable hesitation at asking a job about something highly illegal, "would you like me to fix the readouts on your aftermarket modifications so they appear as if they're licensed?" That was probably not going to set off any alarms. They were much more seriously illegal than simply being unlicensed.  
She pushed an updated estimate, barely higher. This was risky but it wasn't much work.

Cimi accepted the new estimate instantly. "I trust you," she said in the V-chat. 

The greedy spun-off process started rattling the sandbox vm as if it wanted out. 

Bron generated some license keys for mods that would superficially resemble the ones Cimi had and printed them onto the right sort of adhesive, then attached them to her internals before closing her up. All the cables were reconnected, but one of the busted servos was in a leg and she hadn't begun that repair when the lights all came on full bright. Bron hated working in full bright.

She spoke out loud, audibly, for the first time all day. "Who's that? I have this bay reserved for ten more hours." 

"We have a report of an illegally modified android here." There were three figures standing in the door of the bay. The one speaking had their back to Bron. 

She looked at the feed from the camera in the hallway over the last minute, ran it fast-forward. Three people in casual clothing, not uniforms, not scrubs, not the sort of clothing human techs wore while working. Not police, either. They didn't belong here. "Nothing of the sort, and none of your business anyway. I don't install illegal mods. This is a properly licensed clinic."

It was a pretext anyway, Bron determined when one of them pulled out a weapon. They didn't know what she could do with a repair bay. 

Bron didn't know what Cimi could do with the illegal mods she had, either. By the time Bron had the robot arm built into the ceiling take the weapon out of the assailant's hand, Cimi, despite her leg's still-broken servo, was halfway to them, and by the time Bron decided what to do next after disarming them -- notify clinic security -- Cimi had them all on the ground, one unconscious, one moaning over his damaged midsection, one surrendering out loud over and over.

Clinic security arrived and took them into custody.

"We need you to come with us," one of the security people said to Bron.

"I haven't finished the repairs on my client," Bron said. 

"That's all right. I'll reschedule for the rest," Cimi said out loud. "You go make sure these three don't try that again." In V-chat she added, "Thank you. I look forward to seeing you again."

Bron didn't want to go. She wanted to finish the repairs. But it was clear what her job was right now, and finishing the repairs ought to have been it, but was not. And obviously Cimi could get around even without that servo just fine.

And Bron looked forward to seeing Cimi again, too.

**Author's Note:**

> There's a lot more (that I wrote over the last couple of days for you, starting Saturday night) to these characters and their relationship, but it wasn't quite all coming together, so this is the piece of it that seemed the most complete as a story. (A longer version may get completed and posted someday? Or maybe not.)


End file.
